vendredi 16 février 2018

Return of development expirence on using XAMARIN for Tizen TV [XAML,C#,TIZEN]

My return of Experience on the 16th of February 2018
Long story short: I have been playing around for a while now with Xamarin for Tizen TV, and this will be great for us XAML/.NET developer when:

  1. It is fully finished and compatible with Tizen TV,  Tizen 4 Tv are released to the public
  2. that the emulator really works "correctly"
  3. the debugger from Visual Studio actually works
  4. that you can create custom controls to make beautiful UI

I am not in the habit of writing negative posts and this is not one, so let me explain why we should hold off just a bit before we really start using this:
  • After having played with the framework and after feed back from Samsung and having spoken with a developer from the Xamarin porting team from Samsung, as of today Xamarin for Tizen is more in beta IMO then in release even thought the road map says that it is finished:

 The framework is working however there as still a lot of missing pieces.  From what I am told 2018 will allow Samsung to finish developing/debug and see who is interested in using Xamarin for Tizen TV.
  • The Visual Studio Debugger is not working as it should, for example if you set a break point and launch the application on the emulator for Tizen TV I would be hit by one of the following issues either the app will crash, visual studio will crash or when you do hit the break point you will not be able to see the value in you objects using quick watch. (When using the same code FORMS code for UWP, Android or IOS the debugger worked perfectly)
As you can see here:

  • Another issue that Samsung has informed me is that the Emulator for Tizen 4 Tv, is not the best way to develop for their TVs they very strongly recommend that you buy a Tizen 4 TV, the Tv will be updated with the latest firmware and OS.  The emulator doesn't have the same performance as a TV, it has more limitation because it is being vitalized.
  • Currently Rendering custom controls on Tizen with Xamrin is not working which can also be issue as you can imagine. In my case I was trying to create a listview that we holding another listview horizontally, this worked fine on the UWP app but nothing happened of the Tizen TV App. 

All in all Samsung has a little way to go to finish the Tizen APIs for Xamarin and to finish polishing their code before we (developers) can start building awesome Tizen TV application =).  From what I am told the Xamarin porting team at Samsung are working at 100% to fix everything and I am sure that within a few months everything will be finished.






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